Here we are, preparing — for the first time — to officially pay homage to the family with a provincial holiday on Monday.

Yeah, yeah, family is like the weather, you say, everybody talks about it but nobody ever does anything about it.

So here you go. History is about to be made on Feb. 11. Family Day – I’m quoting the provincial government here – is intended to keep families strong by setting aside a day for them to spend time together.

And also, of course, a day for families to spend some money together on the ski slopes, visiting tourist attractions, visiting museums, going to movies or visiting restaurants, taking a day at the park or a national historic site, all those things that keep the economy ticking over and take the edge off complaints that holidays are a drag on commerce.

Whether Premier Christy Clark’s other baggage will permit voters to remember this Monday at the polling station remains to be seen, but for now you can thank her for that rarity, a political promise kept in giving us a long weekend in the middle of the four dreary months between Christmas break and the spring break at Easter.

Not only that, she actually sought the public’s advice on which weekend we’d prefer for the mid-February break.

Our preference was two-to-one in favour of the second Monday in the month. And according to the province’s website, British Columbians asked that our day off not coincide with the mid-winter holidays in Alberta and Washington State. It seems a majority of us expressed concern that tourist destinations here — and there — be able to reap the benefit from two weekends of increased traffic in February instead of one.

Even the labour-conscious NDP never had the nerve, or the verve, to defy the business voices that railed against parsing the bleak depths of winter with a day off for the working classes.

Oh, I know, according to the nay-sayers, a long weekend in February doesn’t do anything for firefighters, or emergency room nurses, or police officers, or pilots, or hospitality trade workers, or even, good heavens, we reporters with a bustling city to cover.

So what? No other holiday does anything for such workers, either. They work on Labour Day and Christmas Day, Canada Day and New Year’s Day. Some of us are just on call and most of us aren’t. Such is the way the cards fall in working life.

But it takes a mean spirit to insist that because the few must work, nobody else deserves a day off. By that logic, none of us would ever be off — not that a minority of the more excitable capitalists among us don’t already think like that or anything.

However, permit one small observation in response. Given our current social and economic models having basically blown up the traditional family over the past 150 years, what’s so rad about dedicating one day a year to encouraging families to recuperate?

Let’s see, the industrial revolution stripped away the extended family in which the elderly, the disabled, the unemployable and the infirm once found a place that provided dignity and support. Now, having forced the off-loading of those duties to external caregivers and institutions in a wage economy, families have to work to pay the taxes and fees that support them.

Next the traditional nuclear family — in which the man earned the family’s income while the woman maintained a household and nurtured children — found itself under siege as rising costs and changing expectations forced more and more women into the work force (not that many women didn’t welcome the broadened horizons).

Half a century ago, almost 85 per cent of men worked in the labour market compared with just 23 per cent of women. Over the intervening decades of transformation from primary resources and agriculture to industrial manufacturing to the information economy, the number of men participating in the labour force has declined slightly — but women’s participation has tripled.

Women flooded into higher education, obtaining the skills necessary to participate in the emerging information economy. By 2008, Statistics Canada reported that women accounted for three out of every four graduates in health sciences and education and two out of three graduates in communications technologies, visual and performing arts, humanities, social and behavioural sciences and law. One of every three graduates in math, computer and information sciences was female.

Today, Statistics Canada reports, male and female participation in the Canadian labour force are roughly equal, give or take a few percentage points. One study of the workplace in 2007 concluded that:

“This major demographic shift has had an important influence on fertility, childbearing and child rearing. Over the same period, the Canadian fertility rate has dropped from an average of four children per woman in the 1950s to a national rate of 1.5 children today.”

As a consequence, the traditional nuclear family is no longer the norm. Families are smaller, down from an average of 3.9 people in 1961 to 2.9 people, and couples with children have declined from 28.5 per cent of all households to 26.5 per cent. In fact, Statistics Canada estimates that some time before 2025 the number of Canadians over 65 will outnumber those under 15 for the first time in history.

Perhaps this isn’t entirely unexpected given other social trends. Every seven seconds another baby boomer turns 60, for example, and life expectancy has increased, so the number of childless couples is naturally on the rise. And considering the differences in life expectancy for men and women, it’s not suprising that the number of single-person households is on the rise, too, divorce rates notwithstanding.

But these shifts are now also a reality of the labour market, say researchers Nora Spinks and Celia Moore in a 2007 study of what such changes will mean for a female-intensive health care sector. In Canada, they note, the majority of women now must remain in paid work even after children arrive, although they tend to max out maternity leaves.

“Sixty-six per cent of mothers with children under the age of three are now in the paid labour force, along with 70 per cent of mothers with children between the ages of three and five and 83 per cent of the mothers with children between the ages of six and 15,” they noted.

However, it’s not just about women trying to juggle work and family, Spinks and Moore found.

“As women have become more embedded in the full-time labour market, men also have expanded their role at home and have become more involved with child care and child rearing. This trend is demonstrated by an almost 400-per-cent increase in fathers taking parental leave during the period 1998-2004. They are equally likely as mothers to report work-life conflict and high work-life overload. Fathers are also just as likely to request flexibility to care for sick children.”

What are the implications of these changes in family structure for businesses that want to keep skilled workers loyal and available to them?

They have to start providing more supportive maternity and parental leave policies, top ups and/or supplementary benefit plans, flexible return to work accommodations or alternative job or work arrangements “that recognize and are respectful of new-parent status; child care supports such as on-site or near-site care, back-up child care, seasonal care, subsidies, resource and referral services and parenting networks; shift flexibility; and support for families with unique challenges, such as children with special needs or multiple-generation care demands.”

The rapid economic change over the last two generations has altered the social landscape where the family has long been a cornerstone. Although families with children still number 3.7 million, or 39.2 per cent of all households, families are changing and becoming more diverse in composition.

One in 10 Canadian children is now part of a blended family that has been reconstituted. Same sex couples have increased 42.4 per cent since 2006. Families range from growing numbers of empty-nesters to Generation X couples struggling to start families, buy homes that require dual incomes and prepare themselves to earn those higher incomes by finishing advanced degrees, Spinks and Moore find.

Yet many businesses have been slow to adapt. Many don’t even appear to recognize the changing demographics and their implications, which perhaps explains the objections when Premier Clark announced she was pushing ahead with Family Day.

If the research is right, history will prove the decision prescient, though. For it appears that strong families are going to be far better for business over the long run than stressed and imploding ones.

The Institute of Marriage and Family points out that many companies depend upon healthy families as customers, as well as employees, and that they purchase everything from insurance to products on grocery shelves. Business, it turns out, has a significant economic interest in promoting strong families.

So enjoy your Family Day, whether it’s with your own kids or a significant other’s or just with your sweetie. What’s good for you, it seems, is good for the rest of us.

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Stephen Hume: In the long run, B.C.'s Family Day will prove to be a good thing for business

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